The reality in education and the work place is that collaboration is the norm. Rows of computer desks similar to rows of sewing machines operated by an army of garment workers should be an image of the past. So you can imagine how frustrated I was when the architect designing our new campus brought us plans he said he had been using in computer labs since the late 1980's. Ten student stations in a center island. twenty more around the outside walls of the room, with one wall left open for a ten foot screen, printers, and the like. He also had a larger and smaller storage rooms accessible from that wall.
We explained that instruction is no longer about a single lesson presented to the group followed by individualized work at their own learning station. Instruction is project based, collaborative, and needs room for learners to spread out with each doing their own part of a larger project. It is not about drill & kill.
At that point he pointed out that he could put an open teaching area next to the computer room and have three glass walls that open up to kiva area of teaching space that would have a short throw projector and room for the class to sit around it as a group when needed instructionally. We showed him the following picture and we agreed to six tables seating five students. Five of the tables would come with a wall mounted flat panel that could display that table's project, or be captured by the teacher to show one image to all class members. I've pasted in my research on the topic below:
The photo above shows a design that empowers Collaborative
Grouping. I would add that each group needs room to spread out for projects,
manipulative, experiments they are working with and recording. Having each zone
with individual video conferencing capability to access off site experts would
be important in today’s environment. This could be done with a laptop or
tablets, but one central web camera with a good microphone would be helpful.
The desk and floor space would need room for tablets with keyboards and power,
so some type of docking – but modular for changing to updated devices over the
years, would be an asset.
Multimedia is so important, yet effective audio seems to be
an afterthought for most classrooms. We would need a design to synchronize all
screens. We want tablets or projects on thumb drives or in the cloud to be
easily accessible and to sound good when played. We would want the teacher and
students to be able to listen to just their group’s sound. We don’t want a lot
of cable mess and headphones thrown around.
We were at a training this month with professionals from
Intel’s Teach for the Future department. The trainers were bemoaning the fact
that a few weeks before they were in a brand new building, all plugs and power
sources were on the walls, nothing available in the center of the room from the
floor or ceiling for tablet use. Our learning labs need to have existing
machines and display capabilities, but also room to accept 30 students with
individual tablet devices with room to spread out and work with built in or
portable keyboards and mice. For that matter, every school desk in a foreword
looking building needs power. We are not using paper textbooks anymore; we are
using individualized devices that have plugs.
We need a kiva area for presenting the daily activity to
young children. It would be best with a large touch screen at one end, with a
small stage. We want it high enough to be easily seen from around the room. We
want pre-k children to be able to reach up and interact with the digital
resources being displayed. I’ve always recommended that in a half-hour to 45
minute computer lab time, teachers should plan for three distinct activities –
start with an opening , have an on machine activity, and follow with a third
activity for individuals or the group if the finish early. We would often start
in a circle around the Smartboard, move to computers, then have small groups
move back to the smartboard as they finish or on to another individual or small
group engaging activity. Young children usually play “parallel”, not in groups,
so planning enough space and learning zones is critical to successful learning
times. Having young children sit at a screen for up to 45 minutes is not
usually educationally productive.
There needs to be an area for recording audio narrations
that has reduced room noise. Individually recorded projects describing or
showing what students are learning will be the norm, so we need to design with
that view in mind.
The text below can be found at the link above:
1. Collaborative
classroom furniture. Collaboration
means interaction between students and teachers and among students, as well.
Problem-solving and group projects require learning
furniture that
adjusts to multiple learners, then quickly reconfigures to individual mode for
activities like testing and independent reading.
2. Sufficient
electrical resources. The
image is common: Students in a school library or elsewhere crowding around a
single available AC outlet to charge devices like tablet computers or laptops.
Schools must realize that electricity is a teaching and learning resource today
and that making it conveniently available (I would say at each desk) is
an asset to the educational experience.
3. Intelligent
lecterns. Teachers
need a technological home base in the classroom. The lectern can
fulfill that need if it incorporates features such as a recessed flat-screen
monitor, USB ports, interactive whiteboard controls and audio/visual
capabilities.
4. Flexible
lighting levels. On/off
lighting is not sufficient for the needs of the 21st-century classroom.
Lighting levels that adjust to a wide range of learning activities better
accommodates today’s realities. It must be easily dimmed or enhanced according
to the needs of the moment. Electronic displays must be viewable and students
should be able to read projection screens and whiteboards whether they are
closest or furthest away from the presentation.
5. Downsized
gathering areas. Space
utilized for large auditoriums may have better uses divided into smaller
gathering areas that host the students of a few classrooms at once. Maintaining
smaller size preserves collaborative and group possibilities. This more
closely aligns with the experience students will encounter in today’s working
world.
The Future of the Computer Lab
This year,
I’ve been serving on a committee that distributes technology funding for
teaching within my college. One of things that these funds do is maintain
computer labs in departments and programs across campus. Many of the computer
labs that these funds will renovate are difficult to keep up to date (and
currently rely upon computers purchased more than 5 years ago which is an
eternity amidst today’s fast moving technology cycle), relatively small
with fewer than 40 computers, and serve relatively focused constituencies
(typically limited to particular departments or programs). These three issues:
the difficulty in keeping labs up to date, their small size, and their focused
constituencies led me to think a bit about the future and function of the
computer lab in the modern university.
As a
preemptive caveat, I’ll admit that I do not teach in a computer lab and our
department does not make use of one. On the other hand, I have been
involved with building a lab and have observed student behavior and the tech
scene over the past 10 years. So with that framework, I’ll offer some
observations here and invite everyone to critique, expand, explode, or reject
my observation in the comments!
1. The desktop computer is on the verge of extinction.
Computer labs are almost always associated with the desktop computer.
At the same time, a Pew
Study (h/t to Mark
Grabe) released last month has shown that just over half (57%)
college-aged students have desktop computers whereas 70% of them have laptops.
The reasons for this are pretty clear. Laptops are now powerful
enough to handle all but the most robust computing needs. To be sure, the
limitations of laptop computers – particularly at the extreme high end of, say,
complex graphics production, video editing, controlling scientific equipment,
or other processes that require significant computing power – still require
desktop work stations with massive, multicore processes, massive amounts of
storage, and robust cooling capacities, and ability to be customized and
expanded. These environments, however, are fairly rare outside of upper-level
or even graduate research programs. Few students ever explore the fringes
of their laptop’s computational power (except perhaps when they are playing
games). The growing preference for laptop computers among “millennials”
makes clear that fewer users and ultimately software makers require the kind of
performance limited to desktop hardware.
2. The
cloud can do almost everything. My suspicion is that while personal
computers will continue to become more powerful, the real growth in computer
power will come through leveraging “cloud” based computing. In other
words, powerful, remote computers with many, many times the power of even the
most robust desktop will be available to handle the most demanding processes.
Unlike a desktop or even a laptop which is designed for a single individual,
cloud based computers can accommodate many users, sometimes simultaneous, and
thereby reduce unnecessary duplication of processing power common to a computer
lab where processing loads are often distributed unevenly across all users.
For example, processor intensive functions – like graphics rendering –
now typically reserved for the most powerful desktop computers, can be sent out
to the cloud where clusters of powerful computer can more efficiently and quickly
handle demanding tasks.
Moreover, companies like CiTRIX are working to bring even common
software to the cloud (like the Adobe suite of image editing software) making
it possible for students to use specialized software which is not running on
their computer, but in the cloud. The student’s computer become just an access
point for the computer power of the cloud and the software running in that
environment. This both eliminates the need for students to purchase
expensive, specialized software for one or two classes and eliminates the need
to limit software on a group of designated machines in a computer lab
environment.
So cloud
computing is not only more powerful, but more efficient. If a student can
leverage the power of cloud computing from their laptop, why do we need to
provide a lab full of powerful desktop computers?
3.
Decentralized learning. Cloud based computing will become more and more
important as programs turn toward increasingly decentralized models of
instruction. The physical computer lab is based on residential, spatially local
models of instruction. While it is my hope that universities will always
have classrooms, labs, and physical locations, I am also aware that the move
toward online instruction will make some of these facilities less important for
the definition of university education. Students taking a class from
around the world will no long be able to use a computer lab located in a
particular building with particular hours and particular physical hardware.
Just as cloud based course management software like Blackboard or Moodle
facilitate spatially decentralized learning models, more specialized software
will also gradually become available in an online environment making the
hardwire computer lab as marginal as the bricks-and-mortar classroom.
4. The line between a classroom and lab is increasingly blurred.
As Anne
Kelsch has discussed, new models for classrooms – particularly those designed around
the principles of active learning – have incorporated many of the features of
the traditional computer lab directly into classroom space. While computer labs
do have the benefit of physically concentrating students working on similar
projects and problems, the classroom as computer lab brings that focus to even
a finer point. Spaces like the SCALE-UP classroom take computers from
the lab (where my mind’s eye sees banks of computers facing the wall or
arranged in ranks) and organizes them both in physical space and through
software to encourage students to work together. While labs have always
been teaching spaces, the line between the lab and the classroom will become
increasingly blurred.
5. The new
economic normal. Computer hardware is expensive to buy, to maintain, and to
keep current. Public universities are under increased pressure to trim budgets
and use resources more wisely. Traditional computer labs will not remain a
cost-efficient way to provide students with access to computer power, software,
or a sophisticated instructional environment. Specialized labs will
continue to exist for particular kinds of highly-specialized computing needs or
to support certain learning environments, departmental or program based
computer labs designed to serve diverse constituencies will soon fall victim to
the changing economic realities of American university life. While many of
the more powerful and specialized cloud based solutions are not inexpensive,
they offer structural advancement over desktop computing by leveraging
economies of scale.
_____
These are
simply my reflections on the role of the computer lab in the teaching and learning
environment. What do you think the future holds for the computer lab in the
21st century university?
3 RESPONSES TO THE FUTURE OF THE
COMPUTER LAB
Thank you
Bill for your thoughtful article. While I agree with many of the points raised,
I will argue for the continued support of the computer lab, although
alternately framed.
Rather than thinking of a computer lab in its current sense, where students
access computers and software that they cannot access at home, I am conceiving
of the lab as an iteration of “docking station” for student mobile
technologies.
Universities such as Stanford, the University of Washington and
Duke, have been offering a variety of campus services accessible via student
mobile devices. (http://mobile.stanford.edu/) A
variety of datasources point to the fact that mobile usage is increasing
dramatically on university campuses (please contact me for precise references
and requests for data). With the release of the dual-core ipad2 yesterday, we
can see that CPU speed should not be a factor in mobile devices for the
foreseeable future.
Hard disk space is also not an issue with the advent of SSDs (solid state
drives). The effectiveness of Moore’s Law combined with the fond farewell to
moving parts (optical and platter), and we are entering into an era of truly
mobile computation.
When I
argue for labs therefore, I will approach this narrative from the perspective
that labs should not be conceived as replacements for student laptops and
mobile devices, but as enhancements for them. I envision rooms with
collaborative technologies, printing stations (xerox phasers, plotters), high
resolution scanners, and docks so that students can link into the
high-performance computing, or high-speed communications that are generally not
available to the public.
Today’s EPSCoR conference on cyberinfrastructure focused in
large part on supercomputing and the concept of parallel computing. It should
not be underestimated that unused resources on campuses, including labs, can be
harnessed using technologies such as the CONDOR pool, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/ to function as clusters that may empower
projects ranging from DNA strand computation, to weather pattern recognition,
and beyond. Parallel computing enables “things that are too big, too small, too
fast, too expensive or too dangerous… to be studied in real life” (spoken today
by the director of supercomputing at the University of Oklahoma).http://www.oscer.ou.edu/
The kind of processing that supercomputing through parallel
cluster computing via harnessing unused computer labs can enable, is the kind
of computation that can take enormous mountains of information and start to
generate meaning. I personally am excited by a newer development in EPSCoR that
was seen today, in that the Digital Humanities were mentioned for (what I believe)
is the first time. Projects such as those created by Geoffrey Rockwell athttp://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal in partnership with six Canadian universities,
demonstrate the financial clout that digital humanities and cultural analytics
can share along with STEM as fruitful and supportive research neighbors.
Timothy J.
Pasch, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communication
University of North Dakota
I have no
doubt that universities are headed toward a computing future that is built
around the students’ (and faculty’s?) own mobile devices. I don’t think the
situation is inherently good or bad; it’s just the way things are. I have some
concern, though, about students falling through the cracks during the
transition. As universities transfer the expense of computer purchases to the
student body, low income students are potentially disadvantaged. Computer labs
open to all students may actually have mitigated the digital divide. Will
laptops available for checkout be included in our future labs?
Kathleen,
I can’t
imagine that will be necessary. Even now personal computers have come down in
price to such a degree that they can cost less than a year’s worth of text
books. As more and more software becomes cloud based and computing power
increases, the price of a laptop will only come down more. We tend to think of
mobile computing as just phones, but in fact, this category will come to
embrace computers as well.
So I would
imagine the days when students will see computers as not the service that the
university provides, but as an personal access point for these services. It
wasn’t that long ago when people expected the phone companies to provide them with
phones, but now phones are highly personalized accessories that allow us to
access a range of services from the phone companies.
I suspect
computing will move in the same direction.
Bill
